E-Go: The British Plane Builder Prepares For Take-Off

David Prosser
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If you’re an entrepreneurial type who has made a bit of money in the tech sector and you’re passionate about flying planes, what’s your next move? For Malcolm Bird, one of the original founders of
ARM Holdings, arguably the UK’s most successful technology businesses ever, the answer was simple: he decided to get involved with a new company to design and build an aircraft in Britain for the first time in more than four decades. Now, thanks to a successful funding round just drawing to a close, that company is on the verge of flying commercially for the first time.

A couple of years back, Bird teamed up with Giotto Castelli, an aeronautical engineer who has designed planes for companies including Airbus and
Raytheon, to launch e-Go Aeroplanes. The fruit of their labours is the e-Go, a light and fuel-efficient single seater that the company plans to begin selling commercially in 2014. The price tag, just £50,000, puts the plane within reach of hundreds of thousands of amateur pilots in the UK and around the world.

The e-Go has attracted more than £660,000 of funding from investors

Investors appear to like the idea. The company has already attracted seed capital from business angels including Herman Hauser, the serial technology entrepreneur. And now it has sourced more than £660,000 of additional funds from Syndicate Room, the British crowdfunding platform that raises equity for companies that already have some funding in place from angels.

The interest of Cambridge-based Hauser is partly explained by e-Go’s location – the business is run out of an airstrip on a converted farm just outside the university city. In flying time, it is just a few minutes from Bird’s former stamping ground at ARM, which is also based in Cambridge. And e-Go is also supported by Marshalls, the influential aerospace company that has been based at Cambridge Airport for many years.

The latest fund-raising, which remains open until the end of February, should give e-Go the cash it needs to get to commercial production. The plane, which runs on ordinary petrol, has already passed Civil Aviation Authority requirements, which were relaxed in 2007 in order to boost the development of the light aircraft sector.

The design is already attracting plaudits, having been nominated for the Design Museum London’s Design of the Year Award 2014. It incorporates detachable wings to help owners store the plane at home – rather than having to incur hangar fees – and there are even plans for a trailer that pilots can use to transport the plane to and from their chosen runway.

For Goncalo de Vasconcelos, the founder of Syndicate Room, the success of the e-Go fund raising on his platform has come as no surprise. “Few companies better epitomise the creative brilliance of British engineering - who else could take modern automotive and F1 technologies, adapt them into a beautiful and groundbreaking aircraft design, and then build and test it on a farm in Cambridgeshire,” he says. “The British aircraft industry was once the envy of the world, and the e-Go shows that for its brightest and best, the sky is still the limit.”

As for potential investors in the company, e-Go points out that the UK alone has 60,000 licensed pilots. And as the Syndicate Room fund-raising has picked up more than the company expected, it is now bringing forward plans for a launch into the US market, where the equivalent number is 600,000.

The pitch to that marketplace is affordable flying – a low-cost plane with relatively modest running costs. That includes fuel consumption, with the lightweight construction enabling the e-Go to fly 60 miles on a single gallon of petrol.

For Bird himself, the dream is of a high-tech manufacturing success that “taps into the memory of the glory days of innovative British aviation”. The boom years at ARM may have been exciting, but e-Go sounds like more fun.